{"version":1,"type":"rich","provider_name":"Libsyn","provider_url":"https:\/\/www.libsyn.com","height":90,"width":600,"title":"RSQ Special Issue: Non-human Animal Rhetorics","description":"This last year I adopted a dog, a scruffy grey schnauzer mix. I call him Pip. I talk to Pip all the time. But I don\u2019t expect Pip to talk back to me, and I don\u2019t think about what Pip calls himself. Maybe I should. The rhetorical power of non-human animals, this week on Mere Rhetoric. Welcome to Mere Rhetoric, a podcast for beginner and indisers about the people, ideas and movements who have shaped rhetprical history. I\u2019m Mary Hedengren   Today we start a new type of episode of Mere Rhetoric. In the past, I\u2019ve given you the low-down on books and movements, scholars and terms, and now I\u2019m going to expand on that to give you the heads-up on some of the most recent issues of major journals in the field. Consider it a sort of Reading Rainbow, a teaser-taster of what\u2019s showing up in rhetorical scholarship today.   Reading journals is one of those activities that I was encouraged to do when I first became a grad student in rhetoric and I\u2019m always surprised how useful what I read ends up being: sometimes I find scholarship that relates directly to what I\u2019m working on, sometimes I find stuff that comes up in conversation, but it\u2019s rare that I regret reading an issue. I recommend reading them to everyone interested in the field, partially because it gives a good sense of what our field actually is these days.   The first issue I\u2019m going to feature, I\u2019m willing to admit though, is a little weird. It\u2019s a the special issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly that came out this summer, and special issue usually means that there\u2019s a theme that all of the articles are about, but even this special issue is special--it\u2019s a Quote rhetorical bestiary unquote. A bestiary is a sort of encyclopedia of the animals, usually loose on the science and loaded on moralizing for a human world, but this rhetorical bestiary is specifically trying to break away from a human-centric orientation towards entering with animals more on their terms.   Within the bestiary, there are mini-essays on children raised by wolves, salmon spawning, a town full of roosting vultures and the cunning of snakes. These essays are an unusual lot for a scholarly journal: rich, imaginative, personal and poetic. They are grounded in theory, but are also beholden to activism, creative writing, and --as might be expected--animal behaviorism. One impetus for this collection is the 25th anniversary of George A. Kennedy\u2019s \u201cA Hoot in the Dark\u201d article in Philosophy and Rhetoric.   Kennedy\u2019s \u201cHoot in the Dark\u201d isn\u2019t included here, but it\u2019s worth checking out on its own merits. George Kennedy was a tweedy classical rhetorician, translating, for example, the definite edition of Aristotle\u2019s rhetoric. So it was a bit of surprise in 1992, when he argued that rhetoric is not an exclusively human endeavour, but that rhetoric \u201cis manifest in all animal life and [that] existed long before the evolution of human beings\u201d (4)... for instance \u201cA rattlesnake\u2019s rhetoric consists of coiling or uncoiling itself, threatening to strike and rattling its tail, which other creatures hear, even though a rattle-snake [sic] is itself deaf\u201d (13). Pretty wild stuff. And the response, as Diane Davis writes in her afterward for the bestiary, \u201cwas to basically wonder what Kennedy had been smoking\u201d (277).   But even if Kennedy\u2019s work was out of character, some rhetorical scholars embraced the non-human animal turn. For instance Debra Hawhee, who also writes an afterword for the issue, has written such works like Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw and Moving Bodies, which explores \u201cthe places in rhetorical theory that are infested with nonhuman animals\u201d (\u201ctowards a bestial rhetoric\u201d 86). Looking at non-human animal rhetoric is a humbling practice that opens up our field and colors our received rhetorical traditions. That being said,I was most impressed by the foreword by Alex C. Parrish and the afterwards by Hawhee and Diane Davis. Davis\u2019 afterward is  espeically illuminating in highlighting that \u201cthere is no single, indivisible line between \u2018the human\u2019 and \u2018the animal\u2019\u201d (278). She also provides a useful dichotomy between two threads in researching non-human animals in rhetoric. One is \u201cstudying human discourses about other animal species\u201d --the way we use non-human animals in our human rhetoric--while the other involved \u201cengaging the specific rhetorical practices of other species\u201d (279).  This latter area of research is particularly interesting to me.   When Pip barks at a strange dog, or drops his ears backwards, or lulls his tongue out in a squinty-eyed smile, he is using symbols just as effectively as Burke\u2019s \u201csymbol using (symbol making and symbol misusing)\u201d human agent. I mean, I can testify that he symbol misuses all the time, especially in his clumsy attempts to make friends at the dog park. Dogs are especially interesting because they are attuned to cross species communication: for millenia, they\u2019ve been learning to read our weird symbols, like me pointing to Pip\u2019s crate, and respond with their own communication, like Pip\u2019s resulting \u201changdog\u201d expression. It\u2019s almost like he\u2019s telling me \u201cI don\u2019t want to go to my room.\u201d But sometimes when you discuss communication with, or among, animals, you\u2019ll be accused of anthropomorphism. Certain, I don\u2019t think Pip communicates the same things in the same ways as he would if he were another human, but, as Davis points out, instead of throwing around accusations of  anthropomorphism, we would be better served by recognizing that communication is beyond the \u201canthro\u201d and rather something inherent in creatures that live in proximity with other creatures.   If you have a great dog story, or other kind of animal communication story, why not drop us a line at Mererhetoricpodcast@gmail.com? Also, let me know what kind of journals you\u2019d like me to be checking in with. I can\u2019t promise I\u2019ll read every issue of every rhetoric journal for you because there\u2019s a lot out there--and you don\u2019t have to take my word for it.     ","author_name":"Mere Rhetoric","author_url":"http:\/\/mererhetoric.libsyn.com","html":"